Real-Time Water Monitoring and Control

A Road to Water Data Analytics and Conservation

Live Building Systems

In the Summer of 2013, the Live Building Systems founding team began an experiment. Without much initial attention, there was a small-scale operation evolving in NYC to combat the ecological damage borne from the real estate industry.

From the beginning, the team sought tirelessly to understand the root cause of inefficiencies. This forced us to examine beliefs, management philosophies, and operational strategies that were long held in the industry. What resulted was a complete reimagination of how real estate organizations can truly optimize their resource deployment to drive efficiency at the firm level. 

Discovery

Through our earliest partners, we were able to refine this organizational strategy to maximize the effectiveness of onsite staff, property managers, and upper management. What we discovered was incredible: by creating truly bespoke systems for each asset, providing real time information to onsite staff and managers, we were able to affect net positive improvements in operational expenses.  

As water became more expensive and scarce over the years, our original thesis that water was a controllobale commodity would be put to the test.  

The long-term belief was that water was not a controllable asset, that water was something that people just wasted, didn’t think about or care about. The long-term damage to apartments, homes through leaks and floods leads to millions of dollars in insurance claims a year, and waste thousands to millions of gallons of clean drinking water a day. 

Lefrak City
Lefrak City

Real-Time Water Monitoring

Today in cities like New York water is becoming more important than ever!

Real-Time Water Monitoring

So back to the summer of 2013 and a small project going…

With one of the largest real estate owners in the United States, a small team of data scientists, plumbers, and onsite staff were taking part in experiment. The experiment was taking water consumption data, armed with analytics and applying onsite changes. Identifying saving opportunities and identifying waste.

What they found was that real time water monitoring, and real time water data analytics, properly deployed, in the hands of the correct people can save millions. The real estate firm worked with Live Buildings to provide the data, user information, to their staff, and not only identify but find and fix costly leaks before bills or damage.